Lord Edmund Blackadder
Edmund Blackadder, Lord Blackadder (1531-1566) was a noble man and a courtier to Queen Elizabeth I. He later became the Lord High Executioner and Minister for Religious Genocide. Lord Blackadder was the first of the family to display the characteristics usually associated with the Blackadders. While his great-grandfather Prince Edmund was cowardly, slimy and sniveling, Lord Blackadder, while still cowardly, veiled it behind a mask of pretend bravery. Lord Blackadder was also demonstrably more intelligent - not only more so than his medieval ancestor but more than most of the people around him, whom he usually regarded with withering disdain. He is also generally considered more handsome and more charming than Prince Edmund, better able to seduce women and has earned a greater degree of esteem from others. He is hated by his rivals rather than treated with a mixture of pity and contempt, as Prince Edmund was. Overall, this gives Lord Blackadder a greater degree of personal dignity than his predecessor and makes him a strangely likeable anti-hero rather than the snivelling, incompetent, sexually repulsive weakling that was his great-grandfather. Lord Blackadder is apparently the great-grandson of the original 'Black Adder', Prince Edmund Plantagenet. As Prince Edmund's wife, Princess Leia of Hungary, was only 14 when he died, and as a legitimate child would have inherited the throne, it is likely that Edmund had an affair with a woman, telling her he was 'The Black Adder'. This seemed particularly likely, as illegitimate children of British royalty were often given lordships and the like. Edmund lived in a reasonably-sized and well-kept house in the Billingsgate area of London. Blackadder almost married his 'manservant' Kate, but the wedding was halted when Kate ran off with the best man, Lord Flashheart. He was head executioner for the Queen, a job that almost lost him his life when he executed a man two days early and then found his family had succeeded in having him pardoned. He was almost killed by the baby-eating bishop of Bath and Wells when he failed to repay the black monks of St. Herod (banking with a smile and a stab). He foolishly tried to talk a 'whopping great inheritance' out of his fanatical puritan aunt and uncle, Lord and Lady Whiteadder, whilst at the same time, holding a wild drinking party in Baldrick's bedroom. The party almost ended in tragedy when Queenie (who had been locked away when Blackadder mistook her for Percy's girlfriend, Gwendolyn) threatened to have the whole party executed when Blackadder accused her of being Merlin, the Happy Pig. Fortunately, she got drunk and forgot. Lord Blackadder was kidnapped, along with Melchett, by the German Prince Ludwig the Indestructible, and was subjected to torture and charades by Ludwig's Spanish interrogator. He escaped and foiled Ludwig's plan to gain control of the English throne. After Blackadder had apparently killed the Prince, Ludwig returned (disguised as the Queen) and murdered Blackadder, as well as the rest of the court. However, it is possible that his time-travelling descendant Edmund III went back in time to fix it so that he actually survived, became Queen Elizabeth's consort and had children by her, founding a Blackadder dynasty that was still reigning in 1999. Like his great-grandfather before him, Edmund left a secret bloodline which led to the next Blackadder to have his adventures chronicled. Category:Pages Category:People Category:Blackadder Family